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The Mummy
The discovery that a mummy of an obese woman originally found at Luxor in 1903 may well be the body of Queen Hatshepsut has been an interesting event for Egyptologists. That this ruler was a woman is, of course, the main aspect of this story that catches the attention of the public in Europe and America. Most news articles about this event also mention two other women who were powerful in ancient Egypt: Nefertiti and Cleopatra. Since for most people these figures are only familiar names, if that, this would be a good time to examine who these women were and to get a little perspective on the role of women as rulers and the ancient world in general.
Egypt was one of the most stable, peaceful and successful civilizations that the world has ever known. At the end of the last ice age mankind flourished. The retreating ice left behind it a wasteland of bare earth, but after the great sandstorms were calmed by the return of grasses to the vast expanses of Asia, massive herds of ungulates were easy prey for expanding tribes of human beings. In time these grasslands were replaced by forests. Forests are rich in wildlife, but the easy protein afforded by the prairie were no longer available, and life for humans who followed the herds became more difficult. People were driven south, and under this pressure mankind learned to farm, especially in the river valleys of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Pakistan.
In time these civilizations developed writing and mathematics, in the beginning to keep track of fields and crops and taxes. For nearly two thousand years these civilizations had a significant military advantage over tribes that still roamed far greater expanses of the earth. With the surplus food production they could generate, they could support armies large enough to defeat attacks by invading tribes, and this gave them security and stability. This unusual, long, and relatively stable period of civilization came to an end with the arrival of the Iron Age, also called the Dark Ages. Barbarians, swept into the great river valleys and adjacent areas, sacking and burning the Bronze Age city-states. The widespread riding of horses and camels in the Middle East began at the beginning of the Iron Age. This gave military advantage to the tribal people who after this point in history became more mobile and active. In the following centuries again and again invading nomads conquered the great breadbaskets of civilization and boats began to bring rounds of invading tribes from the sea.
Egypt was the most consistently stable of the ancient, literate cultures, and during the Bronze Age its rulers were able to sustain dynasties that lasted for hundreds of years. Before the nomads had animals for transport, the patterns of social order and rule, once established, lasted unchallenged, except for brief intermediate periods, century after century. Almost always these civilizations had male leaders. The first of the trio of women rulers of Egypt, mentioned in the press articles, was Hatshepsut, who dressed like a man and wore a false beard. She was the first wife of a Pharaoh who died young and who gave her no sons. She usurped the throne of the legitimate heir, Thutmose III, who was born of a lesser wife, and who was young when his father died. Hatshepsut ruled for twenty years, and when she died Thutmose III made every effort to efface her memory from history.
The second of these famous women chronologically was Nefertiti, the wife of Akhenaton. That Amenophis IV, called Akhenaton, shared his power with his wife was not the only thing unusual about his reign. Akhenaton ignored the traditional religious and social structures that had long sustained this most stable of civilizations. He withdrew to the desert, built himself a new capital and established what was basically a new religion, focused upon the worship of Aton, the sun disk. His reign was a weak period and a time of plagues. His successors abandoned both his capital and his religious experiments, and when succeeding dynasties returned Egypt to traditional ways, they removed from the historical records all of the evidence they could find of his dynasty and its aberrations.
It is important to understand that female rulers in Egypt, like female rulers of China, were rare anomalies, associated with periods of disruption, and were an embarrassment to those who followed. That Hatshepsut did send armies as far as Mesopotamia and south into Nubia is not necessarily a measure of her greatness as a ruler, nor does it indicate that a peaceful and stable period was likely to follow.
We all know something of the reign and exploits of Cleopatra. She was the last Pharaoh. After her reign control of Egypt was under the direct control of Rome. That a woman was on the throne then was evidence of the impotence of Egypt at that time.
Patriarchy has been a primary characteristic of every major, enduring civilization that the world has known. The Amazons are a myth, probably the product of Greek and Roman contact with barbarians from the steppes, some tribes of whom had women among their warriors. Confucius, whose social theories guided China successfully for many centuries, said that a woman in the home is the center of the society. Foot binding in China and the burning of women on the funeral pyres of their husbands in India are repugnant aberrations, even for many loyal members of those cultures, but they are an indication of how important patriarchal order was considered to be by those most successful of cultures.
In the West patriarchy is as much a part of the religious tradition as it is in Asia. The fathers of Israel were referred to as the patriarchs, as were the early leaders of the Church. Western religions, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and the Mormons, begin with Abraham, a nomad roaming about the Middle East after the fall of the Early Bronze civilizations. His heirs, the Hebrew people, wandered in the wilderness beyond civilization, and in time they sacked cities in the Levant, destroying what they saw as a decadent culture. Their religious leaders wrote laws aimed at restricting sexual activity to that between a married husband and wife and preserving clearly defined gender roles. Page upon page of the law lays out rules that define strict roles for women and men. This is far to central a theme to simply ignore. It was central and often repeated, because it was thought to be essential to the survival of a religious community.
For most of their entire history Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and the Mormon Church have held to this same patriarchal tradition. Breaches in this wall of tradition are remarkably recent, and for all of the sects that take this road decline has or will come rapidly. Like the Shakers, these sects are doomed. Look at the numbers. Those groups like the Pentecostals, Mormons, Orthodox Jews, and Muslims, sects that strongly affirm traditional gender roles, are growing rapidly today, while the Episcopalians, Methodists, and Reformed Jews who have embraced feminism are suffering rapid, steady decline. European countries must attract thousands of new Muslims residents each year just to maintain their economies, because so many of their women no longer bear children.
In contemporary literature, especially popular literature, religious people are presented as believing in an other worldly kingdom while modern, science-wise folk are shown to be objective, dealing with the real world. This is in many ways a total reversal of reality. The survival of Judaism for three millennia is a fact. Personally I find the Book of Mormon to be an intellectual embarrassment, but because of Joseph Smith tens of thousands of poor, uneducated people walked two-thirds of the way across a continent and are now in possession of the most beautiful of the American states. The old plan, be it ever so corny, it actually works. Men and women are not perfect circles. It may not seem right to you intuitively the patriarchal order, but did you intuitively learn that you have twenty-three pairs of genes?
I am a photographer best known for my work in Afghanistan, Vermont, and Paris. Several times over the years I have worked in areas of Asia where women are dominant in the culture, in Kalish areas of Chitral(northern Pakistan) and in Ladakh and Zanscar (northern India). These places are invariably in isolated valleys in the mountains, where in centuries past they were protected from the outside world by their isolation. Once modern roads put an end their isolation, these areas fall into declilne, and their cultures disappear. Feminine dominant societies have never controlled for long the great breadbaskets of humanity or the open expanses of Asia. We find them only in protected places deep in the mountains or on isolated islands. Therefore, we should marvel that the Americans and Europeans are voluntarily setting themselves up for conquest, but this is natural, cultural recycling.
Gandhi was once asked what he thought of Western civilization. He said that he though that it was a good idea. Western colonial empires, and especially the American empire, resembles in many ways the invasion of the Mongols. These barbarians have not understood the ways of the great, stable cultures that they conquered. The Mongols mastered warfare with horse herds, and with this military advantage they swept all before them, but military superiority does not imply moral or intellectual or cultural superiority. Their stated aims were to eliminate potential enemies and to open the trade routes. They made freedom of religion and the liberation of women official policy in conquered areas, because these policies undermine traditional authority and social structures, making the people easier to rule. The Mongols would destroy large cities and every living thing in them in order to terrorize others into submission, as the Americans did with the Japanese. They fought wars on an industrial scale, preferring to divert rivers or defoliate huge areas, when doing so would save the lives of their own soldiers, as the Americans did in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. They fought with superior weapons and highly mobile armies, killing their enemies from a distance, instead of engaging them in traditional battles.
The third son of Genghis Khan, Ogodei, became leader of the Mongols, after the death of his father. Ogodei was fat, cheerful, and loved by all his brothers, so he was chosen to lead, but in little more than a decade he drank himself to death. Hungary had already been conquered and turned into a pasture for raising the horse herds necessary for the conquest of Europe. But, in 1241 when Ogodei died the Mongol armies were forced to return many thousands of miles to Karakorum to settle the succession. Mongol women had freedom and political power to a degree that scandalized the ancient civilizations that they conquered. Ogodei’s wife used her power to try and force tribal councils to make her son the new Khaghan, to make the office hereditary, contrary to tribal tradition. All of Ogodei’s heirs were killed. Order was restored, but by the time the succession struggles were over, much of the army had dispersed. The Mongol Empire was divided and went into rapid decline.
This story in the newspapers about the body of Hatshepsut is typical of the propaganda put out by the American media. One of the few articles to appear this year about ancient Egypt focuses on one of the very rare cases when the long and stable civilization of Egypt was ruled by a woman. The feminism that is now in vogue in the Western world is being spread by force to nations like the Afghanistan is a marker of decline. The Western industrial empire, like the Mongol one, has been period of invasion and destruction for much of the world, hardly the beginning of a long and stable and successful period of civilization.
The Americans forced Japan to open its harbors to American trade. They are now forcing the entire world to open the trade routes everywhere, just as the Mongols did. Following the Mongol conquests, the plague ravaged Europe and the lands of Islam for centuries. The ships of Queen Elizabeth and Queen Isabella brought disease and death to tens of millions of people living in the Americas. Gunpowder and the printing press came to Europe along these open Mongol trade routes, bringing bloodshed for centuries.
The small, wealthy elite who own and control the economies of the West are much more like rapacious Mongol Khans looting foreign lands than they are like Old Kingdom Pharaohs expanding stable nations. They are much more concerned with their personal increase in power than they are with creating a stable and healthy world. Their only priority is to make the economy spin faster and faster, in spite of the fact that increasing consumption is rapidly destroying the ecological and social stability of the world. It is highly desirable, from the view point of this industry-owning elite, to put as many women as possible into the work force, because when the number of available workers is doubled, the economy can roar. The press and academia are owned and controlled by this wealthy elite, and they push the “liberation” of women at every possible opportunity.
The family is a remarkably efficient social institution. Plato wanted to do away with it completely in his Republic; Confucious and Moses made it central to social order. While it is definitely in mankind's interest to preserve family structures, because they limit consumption and promote efficient ways of living, those who who own our economy and direct our "culture" desire precisely the opposite. Moving women from the home to the workplace creates a demand for child care, elder care, second homes and cars, commuter flights, clothes dryers and fast food. These demands generate additional jobs, driving the economy to new heights, but this way of life increases the consumption of raw materials and the unnecessary generation of greenhouse gasses. Teachers no longer assign the classics, because it is no longer fashionable to teach young people that Penelope stayed loyally at home weaving her veil. Any literary work, film script, or television plot contrary to the desired gender-bending social vision cannot find publication or is attacked by reviewers.
The decrease in one-on-one contact between young children and their parents, especially their mothers, leads to a decline in the capacity of the next generation. Two years ago I traveled about the East Coast of the United States, stopping along the way to visit a series of old friends. Most of these people are now in their late fifties. In home after home, I found the same story. At every stop I was told of sons who were estranged from their parents, living in the old home town, but uneducated and angry. Each couple had a daughter who was just finishing law school or some other high-end educational curriculum. Again and again the children of my generation seemed to have half-educated, unsettled sons on the one hand and successful daughters with an attitude on the other. Girls mature earlier than boys. This is a fact. Co-educational education is depriving the boys of their self-confidence and giving girls an exaggerated view of their potential and a distorted view of their choices.
Scholars are already talking of the Great European Demographic Catastrophe, for birthrates across that continent are in steep decline, except among minority populations. Nature has its own ways of bringing down the mighty and raising up the lowly, and the steady drift from patriarchy to matriarchy, from objectivity to subjectivity is THE primary natural mechanism of decline and the primary engine of social recycling. Throughout history leadership by women of a society is most often associated with periods near the end of a period of civilization, when decline is already evident, like the Empress Dowager in China or Cleopatra in Egypt. It is merely a symptom, a sign that the values upon which the culture was built have been lost and that the natural cycle moves on.
The history of Asia is often told as the story of repeated conquest of the “civilized,” agrarian areas by ³barbarian² tribes from the desert or the steppes. The most brilliant cultures made use of the talents and traditions of both peoples, the conquerors and the conquered. Left to their own devices urban cultures, inevitably it would seem, descend into decay and decline. Social stratification becomes exaggerated, the rich get richer and the poor poorer, all manner of sexual perversions flourish, and discipline is lost. Children tending herds in the steppes or the desert learn self-sufficiency and common sense through experiences that are denied to city youth. Part of the normal historical cycles, like tides and the seasons, is this refreshing of declining urban/agricultural civilizations through their conquest by the nomads, the vibrant barbarians.
Civilization is defined by literate, urban people, those who think they have a vested interest in only one side of this equation, but over the millennia millions of people have lived exciting and productive lives in places and cultures not defined by scholars as part of civilization. These periods of barbarian invasion serve a function for mankind. It is false to describe human progress on this planet as the steady rise of urban/agrarian culture despite the depredations of nomadic peoples. The invasions by those from beyond the civilized world serve an important function, and they have often provided the leadership necessary to preserve civilization. It is equally false to define progress as the steady elimination of gender roles. In fact one could well build a case for the opposite, that strict gender roles are an essential characteristic of any culture that is stable and enduring.
The Europeans and Americans are relative barbarians from beyond the ancient, civilized world. Despite their limited understanding of how to build a sustainable culture, they have brought new technologies and new disciplines to China, India, and the Middle East. Though this age of invasions has already lasted longer than that of the Mongols, it is still not capable of producing an age of sustained stability and peace. Western, industrialized armies have gone on the rampage again and again, destroying other cultures, killing millions of people, but once this wave has spent itself, better times may return for those cultures that survive. The present drive to build a single world economy with free trade was precisely the vision of the Mongols, and, as with the Mongols, just as they appear ready to complete the task, the end will come rapidly. The rise of feminism in Europe and America in recent years is a clear signal that the end of this age of destruction is finally drawing to a close.
The power of the horsemen of the steppes was destroyed by the rifle. The advantage suddenly fell to the defender. With the rise of the internal combustion and jet engines, advantage was returned for a time to the aggressor. The odds of enjoying long periods of stability and peace in the coming century depends in large part upon developments in digital communication. It is my guess that interlinked, world-wide communication systems will make it more difficult for large empires to be sustained and easier for smaller groups to achieve independence. The new technologies make it possible for many smaller states to coordinate strategies against domination by larger empires, and the end of abundant and cheap energy should work to favor small, efficient states.
I know that what I have said here is a direct violation of one of the most prominent features of what is considered politically correct at the present time in North America and Europe and among the Western-educated elite of Asian and African countries. However, it would certainly have been the majority opinion among educated men in an age where Homer, Virgil, and Danté were more often studied. Confucious would certainly have agreed, and few Japanese leaders would disagree privately even today. Patriarchy was something on which the Bible and Greek literature are generally in agreement, something on which the Sunni, the Shi'a and Mormons can concur.
In the seventeenth century Leibnitz proved that planets travel in elliptical not round orbits. He met with stiff resistance, for ever since the Greeks mankind had been sure that God or the gods would surely have made the universe with perfect circles. Ever since we have been amazed that rational men would have yielded for so long on this point when the mathematical evidence was so overwhelmingly otherwise. By this point in time, theology and Western culture owed more to the Greeks than the Hebrews. The Greeks believed that man could understand the world by reason, by his own reflection. The Hebrew people had had an encounter with a fearful power out in the desert, in conflict and war and escape from Egypt. For them THE mistake was trying to out think, out manipulate this God whose name was derived from the verb, the one that is. It is not a concidence that in recent centuries we have had more important scientists who were Jewish than Greek. The Church, when it opposed Galileo and Leibnitz, had become a cult, worshipping its own trappings and structure, not a people dedicated to following the real, following the truth. In the modern world scientists are prophets when they show us what really is.
In the last few decades the case against the Greek philosophers and in favor of the Hebrew vision of reality has been strengthened considerably, because modern science has quite soundly demonstrated that the universe was not designed so as to be readily comprehensible to the unaided human intellect. The universe is far too strange, too odd for us to have ever comprehended it through reflection. We could never have discerned the most basic structures of matter by pure reason. No, it is out there, this universe, way beyond our senses in both large and small. We are today learning to meet the universe on its own terms, as a fly-speck in a small corner of the stable, not as omnipotent lord, even of our own small domain.
Most of us see ourselves as modern, scientifically aware people; even if the details are beyond our grasp, we think we get the gist of it. How then do you, as a modern scientific soul, turn and accept a notion like this: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...." The term "self-evident" tells us immediately that we are entering the domain of Greek philosophy, with its emphasis upon reason. Is not the dogma of human equality perilously close to that of perfectly circular orbits? It is difficult to imagine any statement about human beings that could possibly be less self-evident than human equality. We are never equal in this world physically, socially, or economically, so in which world are we equal, if not in some Platonic ideal realm of forms?
Do you really need to ask a urologist or a prostitute to know that all men are not created equal? Are you offering me equality in another world to make up for oppressing me here? In every way that we can measure, men are different and unequal, but pretending that they are equal banishes from the table the fundamental issue of their inequality and all of the complex problems that this inequality presents. The American founding father who wrote this nonsense was a slave owner, using democratic rhetoric to obscure social realities. Of the red man Jefferson said: "If we are to wage a campaign against these Indians the end proposed should be their extermination, or their removal beyond the lakes of the Illinois River. The same world would scarcely do for them and us." What then did he mean by "all men?" Using the same "enlightenment" arguments that were so obviously ingenuously written to begin with to argue the case for female suffrage makes those arguments ridiculous.
The maintenance of patriarchy and traditional gender roles in any sect is inversely proportional to their distance in time and space from Jerusalem. In Inuit igloos and on remote Pacific islands, visitors were invited to join the gene pool, but this never happened in the Middle East, at the cross-roads of the trade routes, where wise men knew that disease travelled with the caravans. Many of the social changes in our world in recent years, especially regarding gender, are not the inevitable changes that come with technical development but simply reflect the desire of industrialists to double the work force for their own purpose of increasing profits. They have had to disparage all of classical literature and greatly devalue religious training across the board in order to do this, but these Americans and Europeans are barbarians from the fringes of the civilized world who do not know the ways and whys of classical civilization. The intellectual underpinnings for this shift lie in the same philosophical circles that gave birth to Nazism and Zionism a century ago. These are the intellectual changes made in the West as it sheds the last vestiges Semitic religion in favor of a return to the pantheism and nature worship of their ancestors.
The people of North America are returning to human sacrifice, a practice long followed by the civilizations of the Americas. Canada, for example, sends troops to Afghanistan to placate America, because Canada refused to fight in Iraq. The Canadians would never have dreamed up the Afghan debacle on their own. Canada is sacrificing dozens of its young people in order to ward off economic sanctions from big brother across the border to the north. Whether you sacrifice human beings with a roadside bomb or cut their hearts out with an obsidian knife on a stone alter, I do not see a real difference.
There is something so very smug about an article like the one that I saw concerning the body of Hatchepsut, with its automatic reference to the two other women who managed to hold power for a time during nearly three thousand years. Day to day the press and most academics drive on relentlessly with the feminist agenda, and most people accept this as a moral advance, as the right thing to do. They are oblivious of the extent to which this is a change and one that flies in the face of the best advice of most of the sages of mankind. It is an attempt to, on the basis of questionable philosophy, chart a course contrary to the vast majority of religious teaching, one that has proved to bring disaster in the past. Many people consider feminism to be forward thinking, and it is, but history has cycles, and the way forward for those on top is also the way down. This social change giving women new power in the political world is a natural development, because decadence is normal. It is natural for empires to crumble, for the mighty to fall. This increase in subjectivity is the primary natural force that recycles the nations. It is, to a degree, inevitable, but for an educated man to believe such nonsense is a disgrace, and for most individual young women, choosing a career over family will one day bring sadness and regret.
Luke Powell, Liverpool, Nova Scotia, 19 February 2008
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